


the slow decay of things

by starstrung



Category: Tanis (Podcast)
Genre: Hallucinations, Losing Time, M/M, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-21
Updated: 2017-03-21
Packaged: 2018-10-08 14:47:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10389168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starstrung/pseuds/starstrung
Summary: Working for Cameron Ellis is nothing like Nic expected it to be.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place during the events of 208, about a month after Nic starts working for Cameron Ellis. Some content warnings for emetophobia, some dodgy eldritch presence related consent issues, and some good old forest body horror. If any of things are not your thing, then I would suggest closing the tab, deleting this link from your browser history, and performing an exorcism. 
> 
> Special thanks to [Gamble](https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark) for striking a deal with me in return for some forest horror imagery. I regret it. Are you happy? I regret this.

Nic’s new apartment is close to the woods.

He can see it outside his bedroom windows, the thick mass of green, the sharp silhouettes of the trees rising over rooftops when he looks down his street. The neighborhood itself is quiet, muffled in a way that his old one wasn’t.

There’s not much traffic here, and it’s about a forty minute drive back to the city, but when he leaves his window cracked open at night, he can hear the sound the woods make. The sound that Tanis makes.

It’s that low crackling hum, like the constant background static of an old radio underneath your favorite song. He remembers it from when he was in the woods with the Runner — Veronica —  although then, it was so strong that he struggled to separate his own consciousness from that constant, fluid pressure. Like he and it were blurring together.

And when the wind is right for it, he lets it sweep into his room and rock the door of his bedroom in its frame, and then he can smell it too. Tanis smells like rot, metallic and sweet.

Working for Cameron Ellis is nothing like Nic expected it to be.

The job he’s been given is to collect and measure the fine root systems of trees in that area. It’s, well, it’s pretty tedious.

Nic tries to tell them that he’s not even remotely a botanist. He still feels guilty about getting completely lost when the technician explains what the spatial deployment of the fine roots can tell them about the ecosystem. Something about carbon storage and nutrient flux. Nic had done his best to nod and hum at the right parts.

That being said, the work isn’t too bad. He would never say he’s particularly an outdoor person, even if he has been spending a lot of his time wandering through forests. But there is a certain appeal in getting paid to dig through mud for roots.

And it means exploring Tanis. Or, the Breach, which is what Ellis calls it. Different words for the same phenomena, that same disrupt in reality that he’s now spent so many months puzzling out.

He feels — different, when he’s out in those woods. Like part of him is asleep, but another part of him is slowly waking up. But every time Nic thinks he’s getting a grasp on that strange feeling, like a hidden seam of Tanis is unfolding, his twenty minutes end, and he has to go back inside, per his agreement with Ellis.

It’s like always being on the cusp of a discovery, and always having to step back from the next new twist in the mystery. It’s barely been a month, and Nic is aching for more.

It doesn’t take Nic long to realize that Ellis is learning more from Nic in this arrangement than the other way around.

When he started working here, he agreed to the constant medical tests, evaluating the effects of the Breach on the human anatomy. As far as he knows, all the workers who spend time outside have to go through the same tests. He doesn’t really enjoy being poked with needles and asked strange questions by the processing team every day. But if it means being able to spend more time out in the Breach, he finds he can live with it.

It’s hard to say what the Breach feels like to him. If he has to describe it, he’d say that he feels _watched_. Tanis has always carried a presence, a watchfulness to it. And maybe that’s why the rules of it feel so dire.

Tanis is something you have to approach, to seek, he thinks. Approach it the wrong way, or linger for too long, and — Nic thinks of the piles of severed feet washing up on shores, of Marcus tearing away his own skin, baring his ribs and beating heart for Nic to see, of children with hollowed empty eyes.

It does seem to be a trend that whatever goes into the woods doesn’t always come back out the same way. Nic doesn’t know how he fits into this. He doesn’t feel different. He feels better, actually. Nic has more energy, has been eating more regularly. He sleeps well every night, still only three or four hours, but feeling well-rested when he wakes.

Maybe all those myths about Nicholas Flamel finding the secret to immortality in Tanis aren’t as far-fetched as he thought they were.

-

Nic is used to losing track of time, especially when he gets lost in his work. It’s not any different from when he’s making final edits on interviews to cut into a new episode of the podcast, or harvesting root samples from trees in the Breach.

This is new, though. This time he doesn’t remember how he got inside.

“You were out there past your limit,” Cameron Ellis is saying. It’s hard to tell if he’s angry or not. Nic is good at reading body language, at intuiting intentions. It’s how he knows whether to press for answers or not. But Ellis is always just so calm, so fortified. Nic is never certain of whether he’s finally going to tell him something he wants to know, or turn Nic away for good.

“I must have forgotten to set my timer,” Nic tells him.

He realizes he’s sitting on the examination table in the lab where they usually take his samples and make him take his exit interview. None of the usual members of the processing team are visible. Have they already run their tests? Nic has no memory of it, but he also can’t remember coming inside from the woods.

Ellis doesn’t move from where he’s standing in front of the door, arms crossed. “Like you forgot the day before this?” he asks. “And the day before that?” He looks, if Nic had to provide a description, like he’s been here before. Like he’s had this conversation already, and the repetition is starting to wear on him. Ellis looks older than his years, at the moment.

“Sorry,” Nic says, looking down at his hands. There is dirt underneath his fingernails, even though Nic’s pretty sure he wore gloves when he went outside.

“No, you’re not,” Ellis says, and it’s the knowing way he says it that makes Nic suspect Ellis isn’t angry at him at all, or even surprised.

“Okay,” Nic says, slowly. “Why do I get the sense that you were waiting for this to happen?”

Ellis shrugs. “You’re more open to the Breach’s effects than the rest of us, Nic. You entered it, stayed in the cabin, and came back out. It’s possible that not all of you returned.”

Nic can’t help but snort a little. “What does that even mean? I’m not recording right now, so you don’t have to be, you know, all cryptic and mysterious. I’m _here_. I’m fine.”

Ellis doesn’t look convinced. “Do you remember what you said to Richter when she came to take your blood?”

Nic doesn’t see how he can lie his way out of this one. “No, I don’t,” he answers.

Again, if Ellis is surprised, he doesn’t give any indication of it, which is even more annoying than it was the first time. “I believe it was ‘There are wondrous things. There are magical things,’” Ellis says, quoting what are supposedly Nic’s words in that even, measured tone.

“Right,” Nic says, unsure if he should believe him or not. It’s not like Nic remembers. Nic wonders, suddenly, if he could have been drugged. If Ellis would do that to him. He honestly doesn’t know.

“I told you to be careful, Nic,” Ellis says.

“You realize that’s about as unhelpful a warning as you can get, right?” Nic tells him, his tone coming out more bitter than he means it to be. “I can’t trust you if you never — I don’t understand why you can’t be more specific.”

A faint smile, almost apologetic. Nic doesn’t think Ellis enjoys not telling him anything. Or at least, he’s good at hiding it if he does. “I don’t know if you’d take my warnings even if they were more specific,” Ellis says.

“Yeah, funny how that works.” Tired of dealing with half-truths and non-answers, Nic gets down from the examination table and reaches for his jacket, which is hanging off one of the chairs.

“Where are you going?” Ellis asks patiently. He doesn’t move from in front of the door.

“I’m done for the day, right?” Nic says, aware that he’s being waspish. “I’m heading home.”

“Richter still hasn’t finished taking your samples,” Ellis tells him. “I told her to wait until we were done talking, remember?”

Nic looks at him a moment, trying to judge if he’s telling the truth. But he figures that Ellis wouldn’t have any reason to lie about some blood tests. And anyway, so far Ellis has never outright lied to him. He’s just refused to tell him the whole truth.

Nic nods, and sits back down on the examination table. Ellis brings in Richter again and, to Nic’s surprise, sits down in one of the chairs and stays in the room while Richter works.

Ellis doesn’t speak, or ask any questions. Just watches the process. Nic considers asking him to leave, but there might have been something in all those forms he signed when he started working here that gave Ellis access to all his medical results. Not that Nic read those all that carefully.

It’s not exactly like he needs privacy for this anyway. All Richter does is mechanically take some blood, measure his heart rate and blood pressure, and then swab the inside of his mouth, like usual.

Nic is beginning to think that Ellis will stay completely silent, until he says, quietly, “and the soil samples too, Richter.”

Richter nods, and takes one of Nic’s hands.

“Sorry, what?” Nic says, pulling away instinctively. He looks to Ellis, but Richter is the one to reply.

“The soil you have caught underneath your fingernails,” she explains, completely unperturbed by his reaction. She holds out her hand. Nic has seen her a few times before, usually for these tests. He wishes he could remember what her first name is.

“Oh,” Nic says. He lets Richter take his hand again, and she begins to gently scrape the dirt out from underneath Nic’s fingernails with a small set of forceps, collecting it all into a small plastic bag.

It’s not a particularly unpleasant experience, just strangely personal, even with Richter wearing gloves. It’s like having someone else cutting Nic’s fingernails for him. He wishes there was a polite way of asking to do it himself. The entire process, finger by finger, takes longer than he expects it to, but Ellis still doesn’t move from the chair at the back of small examination room.

Nic feels, well, _observed_. Like they’ll keep talking about him as if he’s not even in the room. _The subject seems to be improving today, Doctor_. Or even, _the super serum trials are progressing wonderfully, Doctor._ Maybe he’s been watching too many crappy sci-fi movies on Netflix.

“Is this what happens to Marcus too?” Nic asks Ellis, as Richter continues to scrape dirt out from underneath his left thumbnail. “Did you watch him like you’re watching me? Down in that cell where you keep him?”

Ellis blinks at him. It’s the first time Nic has seen Ellis taken aback by something he’s asked, and he lets himself feel a small measure of victory. He only wishes his voice recorder was on.

But Ellis shakes his head. “No, I don’t. You’re special, Nic. There hasn’t been anyone like you, not in my time.”

It’s the first thing Ellis has told him all day that actually sounds genuine, even if Nic has no idea why that’s the case.

After a day where Nic isn’t even sure of his own memories, he’ll take that, at least.

-

The missing time should bother him more, but he barely even thinks about it for the rest of the week. There’s just so much to do. Alex needs his help extracting the vocals from an interview recording and putting the finishing touches on an episode, and then MK sends him a bunch of information she finds on Lyle Stevik that he has to sort through to see if anything’s relevant.

MK only finds out about it by accident when she asks him how his work with Cameron Ellis is going.

“Yeah, uh, from what I can remember, it’s going pretty well. I haven’t gotten many answers out of him, though,” Nic says distractedly, as he scrolls through the long email that MK’s just sent him.

“You what?” MK asks. “From what you can remember? What does that mean?”

“Oh,” Nic says, realizing his slip. “Uh.”

“ _Nic_ ,” MK says, in that tone of voice. The _before you answer, remember that I probably know your social security number_ voice.

“Well, I lost time,” Nic admits. “A couple of hours, I think. I don’t remember coming inside from the woods.”

“Holy fucking shit, Nic,” MK says. “You need to get out of there. What did I tell you? I told you that you couldn’t trust him.”

“It’s not that serious, is it?” Nic says, laughing a little. “I just lost track of time or something. It’s not anything like when I was in the cabin.”

“Are you kidding?” MK says, sharply. “It’s exactly like that. Anything could have happened. And Cameron Ellis, he — he fucking knows something, Nic.”

“I know he knows something, that’s why I’m still working for him, remember?” Nic says.

“Nic, he showed you Marcus,” MK says. “He showed you what he’s able to do. He’s locked up some poor fucker in there, with full sanction, apparently, just to keep him under observation.”

“Yeah, and I agree that that’s completely messed up,” Nic says. “But what does it have to do with me losing time?”

“Well, Tanis is clearly doing some crazy shit to you,” MK says. She takes a deep breath, lets it out. Nic realizes he’s never quite heard MK this stressed. “So what I want to know is how much shit has to happen to you before Cameron Ellis decides to lock you up too.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Nic tells her. “He barely even lets me stay out in the Breach. He’s not going to keep me there.”

“Look, the last time you disappeared into the woods, I was too late to stop you,” MK says, voice flat. “I’m not going to be too late this time.”

“You’re not,” Nic tells her. “I promise.”

MK sighs. “Good. Because I’ve got a lot of ongoing leads right now, and it would really suck if you died and couldn’t pay me anymore.”

Nic laughs. “Noted. I won’t die.”

“I’m holding you to that,” MK says, and hangs up.

-

The longer he spends outside in the Breach, the more it becomes clear that he’s experiencing — something. A kind of euphoria, but also clear-headedness. It’s like the answers of Tanis are being laid out one by one, and he just needs to find the hidden pattern to realize what’s right in front of him.

About a week after losing time, he’s out in the woods again, collecting more samples. He stops working for a moment to work out a kink in his shoulder. As he stretches, he listens to the sound of the Breach humming inside his head, that pleasant, benign pressure. His mind drifts as he continues to work, thoughts going blank.

Nic doesn’t realize that he’s been staring out into the woods until he feels a hand on his shoulder.

“Nicodemus,” Cameron Ellis calls, behind him. “You’ve been out for too long. Come with me.”

The warmth from Ellis’ hand hits him, and Nic realizes that he’s shivering, that the sun has set, and the sky is darkening overhead. A light rain is falling, and the lab coat that he’s been asked to wear is sodden.

The last thing he remembers is putting on his coat and heading out into the woods to collect samples. The sun had definitely been out then. But that was this morning. It’s clearly been many hours since then.

Unable to provide an answer for why he’s still outside, Nic lets Ellis steer him back to the facilities. Instead of the usual room where the processing team holds his exit interview, Ellis takes him to a room he’s never been in, one that’s been set up to look like a hospital room.

“What’s this for?” Nic asks.

“You were exposed to the Breach for much longer than the allotted time, Nic. We have to keep you under observation to make sure there haven’t been any adverse effects,” Ellis explains.

“No, that’s not necessary, I—” But without warning, Nic’s entire diaphragm heaves without his consent, like something is pushing its way out. He makes it to the bathroom just in time, clutching at the sides of the bathroom sink as his body suddenly decides to reject whatever’s in his stomach.

He doesn’t remember eating anything past a light breakfast this morning, and so the volume of it surprises him. When his vision finally clears, he looks down at what just came out of him, and feels his knees go weak with horror.

“What the fuck,” he gasps, wiping his mouth.

He’s aware of Ellis coming to stand behind him in the doorway of the bathroom. Nic’s not sure if he’s saying anything to him, that is how loud the sound of blood rushing through his ears is.

What’s in the sink is nothing that he should have had in his stomach. Pieces of leaves and thin bark, rough coarse soil with pale threads of fungus. And a small orange wriggling shape caught in the dark mass, a beetle with too many legs, still very much alive.

He feels something at the back of his throat and coughs into his hand, but whatever’s there does not dislodge. Nic still feels it though, threatening to make him gag again.

“Oh my god.” Nic reaches shaking fingers to the back of his mouth, and pulls out a long, thin fine root, exactly like the ones he’s been taking samples of. It hurts as he takes it out, like somehow it was growing into him.

When his legs finally give out and he stumbles backwards, Ellis catches him, keeping him from falling to the floor.

“Calm down, Nic,” Ellis says. His hands are on Nic’s face, holding it in place so that Nic has to look into his eyes. He is as calm and composed as ever, as if he didn’t just watch Nic heave the contents of a forest floor into the bathroom sink.

Nic is aware that he’s taking quick shallow breaths, that he’s panicking. “What,” he says, his throat raw and aching. His mouth tastes like dirt and rotting things. “What’s happening to me.”

“You need to breathe,” Ellis tells him, and Nic realizes that Ellis is not surprised that this is happening to Nic, just like he wasn’t surprised that Nic was spending more time in the Breach and losing time. He understands, distantly, that this may have been what Ellis expected when he first hired him.

Nic takes in a deep shuddering breath, holds it, and lets it out.

“Good,” Ellis says. “That’s good. Keep going. You’re going to be alright.”

He helps Nic to the bed, and Nic sits down heavily, still shaking, still struggling to spread out the gaps between breaths. He realizes he’s not just hearing the sound of blood rushing through his head. He’s hearing that familiar deafening roar.

“Oh, god, it’s here,” Nic says, his voice barely more than a whisper. “It’s in my head, I can hear it. Just like before.”

“What can you hear?” Ellis asks. He sits next to him on the bed, but Nic can’t bear to meet his eyes. He can’t even breathe. “Nic,” Ellis says softly, laying his hand at the back of Nic’s neck and squeezing gently, until Nic lets out a breath that sounds more like a sob.

“The Blur,” Nic says. “It’s so loud. I can feel it in my head trying to — rewrite me, or make me a part of it, somehow.”

“But you can fight against it, can’t you?” Ellis says. “You’re strong. You were able to come back from it before.” His hand rubs patiently at the back of Nic’s neck, and Nic sinks lower into the fog that’s been engulfing him ever since Ellis took him back inside.

Everything else slips away. The terror, the shock of looking into that bathroom sink, the cold he still feels from the forest. All he can sense is the Blur.

If only there were a way to block it out. Nic wishes for Dr. Burnett’s hypnosis, to push it all away, make it seem like it’s happening to someone else. He doesn’t know how long he spends, how long Ellis watches him listen to it, trying to pull away from its influence.

“It’s going away,” Nic says, realizing it as he says it. He can feel it fading, retreating to that benign hum that it was before. “It’s getting quieter. Oh, thank god.” Nic feels an immense tension leaving him, loosening his muscles, as if he just pushed away an incredible weight.

Ellis pulls him in, and Nic goes, weak from exhaustion and relief and the tremors leftover from bringing up the contents of his stomach. Ellis lets him gasp into his shoulder, his hand still a solid weight on the back of his neck.

Eventually, his breathing stabilizes, the hum returning to a faint haze at the edge of his awareness. Ellis pushes him away gently and settles him upright.

“I’ll be right back,” Ellis tells him. Nic sits and watches while Ellis gets up to talk to someone out in the hallway, feeling strangely empty.

The next minutes are unfocused. Nic remembers the processing team come in, running their usual tests, the press of a needle at the inside of his arm. When he looks up, Ellis is watching him.

“I’m not staying here overnight,” Nic says. “Am I?” MK’s words ring in his head, of Cameron Ellis locking him in a cell just like Marcus.

But this isn’t a cell. He doesn’t think it’s a cell. He’s too tired to think. He feels like the hum is lulling him to sleep.

“We just want to make sure there aren’t any lingering effects, Nic. I’m not going to ask you to stay here against your will. But remember that we still have no clear understanding of what prolonged exposure to the Breach can do. There are no guarantees against there being harmful side-effects, I’m afraid.”

The suit that Ellis is wearing is probably worth more than Nic’s car, and there is now a large smudge of mud across the chest and shoulder where he was holding Nic. Looking down, Nic realizes his arms up to their elbows are covered in filth. He wipes at his face, and mud, slick with sweat and tears, rubs off.

“Yeah, alright, I—” Nic rubs his hand off on his jeans, which he finds are equally disgusting. “I think I need something to change into, if that’s okay.”

Ellis nods. “Of course. There’s some clothes for you in the bathroom. Get cleaned up, and get some rest.”

He leaves, and Nic makes himself walk to the bathroom. There, he finds that the sink is completely spotless, not a smudge of dirt anywhere. Nic wonders if he hallucinated what happened to him, or if one of the technicians cleaned up after him while he was out of it. He’s not sure which possibility he’s hoping for.

Unsure of what to do with them, he kicks his dirty clothes into a pile in the farthest corner of the room. The bathroom doesn’t have a shower, so he cleans himself up as best as he can anyway, taking advantage of the toothpaste and toothbrush. He brushes until he can’t taste dirt anymore, and the water that he spits out runs clean.

Nic runs a wet hand through his hair and can’t help but laugh with disbelief when his fingers pull at sticky knots of his hair. He reaches up and picks out clumps of spiderweb, translucent loops of it all caught in his hair, all the way down to his scalp. He has to dunk his head under the sink faucet and comb out his hair with his fingers for a solid ten minutes before he stops finding pieces of it.

When he finishes, his hair is sopping wet, and there’s a slightly disgusting puddle soaking into the bathroom mat. He changes into the clothes that Ellis has given him, just simple scrubs, and collapses into the bed.

-

Nic finds himself at the interstices between awake and dreaming, the air suddenly so hot and muggy that he immediately kicks off his blankets.

The hum is still quiet, but it’s more pervasive now, filling him with a restless energy even as he sleeps. Images flit through his mind of the cabin in the woods, of immense shadowy figures waiting to devour him. And through it all, that thrumming presence, the call of Tanis, echoing through his bones, his blood.

He’s hard. In his dream running through the woods, Nic is distantly aware of this, of pushing his hand into the elastic waistband of his scrub pants and wrapping his fingers around his dick, rutting into his hand.

In this dream state, desire crashes through him with an immensity that it doesn’t achieve when he’s awake. It doesn’t even feel like his desire, as if he’s channeling something else, the hunger and lust of a presence much greater than he is.

Nic is aware of moaning, of twisting onto his stomach, of panting into the thin mattress, his hand moving on his cock. His actions are not his own, he is being overcome with a mindless, atavistic urge.

The smell is back, that sweet, cloying decay. He has stopped running. He is surrounded on all sides by grotesque creatures. The nearest one, huge and towering, its head shaped like a bird, reaches a hand out towards him. Nic is no longer sure if what he’s feeling is terror, or pleasure. In the dream, he does not move as those fingers, slender and long, reach all the way around his throat.

The dream shifts abruptly. The forest floor gives way underneath his feet and he descends into the earth. Suddenly, he is in complete darkness, the earth pressing in on him. He has a small pocket in the loose soil with air for him to breathe, but even that is threatening to collapse.

Soil begins to fill his mouth and his nose, begins to cover his eyelids. Nic tries to claw his way up, but every movement just pushes him further down into the damp earth. He’s being buried alive. He’s aware of this, even as he’s aware of the knife’s edge of arousal hitting him, every muscle tightening in anticipation. His eyes are rolling back in their sockets; he feels possessed.

All around him, he can hear the movement of tiny creatures, of insects and worms and beetles as they eat everything around them. He realizes that even if he has escaped the shadow creatures above him, Tanis will still consume him.

Nic’s entire body spasms as he comes, pleasure searing through him with an intensity that is very nearly painful. He is conscious of crying out, of pressing his face into his pillow to muffle it. He thinks for a moment that his heart will stop from it.

When it’s over, he collapses back onto the mattress. The dream is beginning to fade out, replaced with a dreamless sleep. The last thing he feels in that dark press of earth beneath the forest is something immense moving far below him, the endless twisting coils of Eld Fen.

-

A knock on his door wakes him up. He pushes himself upright in bed with weak arms, completely disoriented. It takes him a few seconds to realize where he is.

“Come in,” Nic says, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

“Good morning, Nic,” Cameron Ellis says, walking into the room. He stops a few feet away from Nic’s bed, his eyes darkening.

Nic realizes with a flush of heat what he looks like. The mess of his sheets, half of them on the floor, half of them twisted around his ankles, the stain he’s left in the mattress, the memory of what he did last night. Ellis does not say anything.

Nic tries to pull the blankets up, aware that his face has turned red. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Ellis, I don’t know what—”

He’s shoved backwards onto the bed, as Ellis moves on top of him, pinning him down with a hand on his chest.

This time, the heat twisting in his belly is his own, and he makes a sound embarrassingly close to a whine when Ellis moves his thumb to press, carefully, at the bob of his Adam’s apple. He’s half-hard already, even with last night, like Tanis has given him new vitality in this respect as well.

“I told you that you’re more open to the Breach’s effects, Nic,” Ellis says, his hands cupping Nic’s jaw, looking into his eyes with a deep intensity as if he can still observe Nic’s dreams through them. “There’s something about you, something that will help us understand.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking — _oh_.” Ellis shoves his pants out of the way, freeing his cock. He takes it in his hand, and squeezes, as it fills with blood in his grip. Nic tries not to move, but can’t help from lifting his hips, trying to fuck into that friction.

It still feels wrong to call him Cameron, even in this situation. Nic bites his lip to keep from whining again, and then says, “Mr. Ellis, I—” The hand around his dick tightens with approval and Nic breaks off his sentence with a gasp. He tries to continue. “I’m not usually like this. I swear. This is — _fuck_.”

His voice breaks on the last word as Ellis moves down to take his cock into his mouth. He keeps one arm heavy across Nic’s ribs, to keep him from moving. Nic, unable to think, to react, presses his hands over his overheated face, tries to steady his breathing.

Ellis is as patient as always, working at a slow rhythm that is making Nic come thoroughly, painfully undone. Nic keeps still, other than the occasional involuntary twitch of muscle. The only sign that Ellis is losing any composure, when Nic finds the strength to look down, is a faint sheen of sweat across his forehead.

The image of Cameron Ellis with his lips stretched across his dick proves to be too much, however, and with a gasp, Nic comes. It’s not as violent of a reaction as before, but that restlessness leaves him, to be replaced with a heaviness in his limbs. Nic struggles upright, unwilling to fall asleep again.

“Give me a moment, and I’ll drive you home, Nic,” Ellis says, wiping his mouth and straightening up off the bed. He arranges his clothes back into order with a few tugs, and other than a faint bulge at his crotch, he looks like nothing has happened. Nic, meanwhile, struggles to pull his crumpled scrub pants back on. His bones feel like they’re suddenly made of honey.

“What about — well,” Nic trails off his sentence, unsure of what to ask.

Ellis shakes his head. “I’m fine, Nic, but thank you,” he says, as if Nic just offered to buy him coffee, instead of — god. The consequences of what they’ve just done begin to filter in through the daze. He has no idea how he’s going to address this on the podcast, or whether to address this at all. He winces.

Ellis smiles again, that faint barely-there softening of his expression. “I’ll bring you some new clothes since those ones aren’t, well, appropriate anymore.”

“Okay, yeah, thanks. Sorry about the, uh.” He doesn’t know what he’s apologizing about anymore. “The trouble, I guess.”

That same smile. Nic can’t tell if it looks amused, or fond. “Don’t mention it, Nic.”

He leaves, and Nic drags his hands across his face. He has to think about what he’s going to tell MK.

 


End file.
